Contours of Agency
Author: Sarah Buss
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2002
Total Pages: 390
ISBN-13: 9780262025133
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA wide range of philosophical essays informed by the work of Harry Frankfurt, who offers a response to each essay.
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The Contours and Composition of Agency Doctrine
Author: Deborah DeMott
Publisher:
Published: 2014
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis Essay explores the history of formulations of agency doctrine, arguing that agency law can best be rationalized as a distinctive subject by recognizing that an agent acts as an extension of the principal. The Essay relies on historical material, some unpublished, related to the drafting of the Restatements of Agency, the disagreements among Reporters and other participants about the contours of agency law, and the intellectual backdrop against which these experts worked. Their disputes, preceded as they were by challenges to the fundamental coherence of agency law, led to successive formulations of agency doctrine; while attempting to provide a comprehensive level of generality, some formulations threatened to distort established limits on the scope of a principal's responsibility for the actions of a principal. The Essay develops in particular the history of the doctrine of inherent agency power, tracing its origins back to the early days of work on the first Restatement of Agency through to the Restatement Third, which jettisons the doctrine. Originating as a form of catch-all (termed a "third bottle" by those working on the first Restatement) inherent agency power as a doctrine was an over-generalization that responded to the narrowness with which other doctrine were formulated, in particular apparent authority.
Talking to Our Selves
Author: John M. Doris
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2015-03-19
Total Pages: 367
ISBN-13: 0191047325
DOWNLOAD EBOOKJohn M. Doris presents a new account of agency and responsibility, which reconciles our understanding of ourselves as moral agents with psychological research on the unconscious mind. Much philosophical theorizing maintains that the exercise of morally responsible agency consists in judgment and behavior ordered by accurate reflection. On such theories, when human beings are able to direct their lives in the manner philosophers have dignified with the honorific 'agency', it's because they know what they're doing, and why they're doing it. This understanding is compromised by quantities of psychological research on unconscious processing, which suggests that accurate reflection is distressingly uncommon; very often behavior is ordered by surprisingly inaccurate self-awareness. Thus, if agency requires accurate reflection, people seldom exercise agency, and skepticism about agency threatens. To counter the skeptical threat, John M. Doris proposes an alternative theory that requires neither reflection nor accurate self-awareness: he identifies a dialogic form of agency where self-direction is facilitated by exchange of the rationalizations with which people explain and justify themselves to one another. The result is a stoutly interdisciplinary theory sensitive to both what human beings are like—creatures with opaque and unruly psychologies-and what they need: an account of agency sufficient to support a practice of moral responsibility.
Contours of Dignity
Author: Suzanne Killmister
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2020-02-20
Total Pages: 178
ISBN-13: 0198844360
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Contours of Dignity, Suzanne Killmister sets out an original and innovative approach to understanding dignity. She considers the relationship between dignity and respect, the ways in which shame and humiliation can constitute dignity violations, and the links between dignity and human rights. Departing from the dominant conception of dignity as an inherent feature of all human beings, Killmister instead ties dignity to personal and social standards. She argues for a tripartite theory--comprised of personal dignity, social dignity, and status dignity--in which dignity is to be understood in terms of the norms to which we hold ourselves and others. This revised understanding opens the door to a rich exploration of the moral significance of dignity, and the ways in which dignity can be violated, frustrated, or destroyed. These fresh insights can then help us understand the distinctively dignitarian harms that are inflicted on people when they are tortured, humiliated, or disrespected. Killmister concludes by offering a novel account of human rights, one that is built upon the idea that the 'human' in human rights should be interpreted as a socially constructed category.
Understanding Human Agency
Author: Erasmus Mayr
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2011-09-15
Total Pages: 320
ISBN-13: 0191619264
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOur self-understanding as human agents includes a commitment to three crucial claims about human agency: that agents must be active, that actions are part of the natural order of the universe, and that intentional actions can be explained by the agent's reasons for acting. While all of these claims are indispensable elements of our view of ourselves as human agents, they are in continuous conflict and tension with one another, especially once one adopts the currently predominant view of what the natural order must be like. One of the central tasks of philosophy of action consists in showing how, despite appearances, these conflicts can be resolved and our self-understanding as agents be vindicated. The mainstream of contemporary philosophy of action holds that this task can only be fulfilled by an event-causal reductive view of human agency, paradigmatically embodied in the so-called 'standard model' developed by Donald Davidson. Erasmus Mayr, in contrast, develops a new agent-causal solution to these conflicts and shows why this solution is superior both to event-causalist accounts and to Von Wright's intentionalism about agency. He offers a comprehensive theory of substance-causation on the basis of a realist conception of powers, which allows one to see how the widespread rejection of agent-causation rests on an unfounded 'Humean' view of nature and of causal processes. At the same time, Mayr addresses the question of the nature of reasons for acting and complements its substance-causal account of activity with a non-causal account of acting for reasons in terms of following a standard of success.
Agency and Embodiment
Author: Carrie Noland
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2010-02-15
Total Pages: 273
ISBN-13: 0674054385
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Agency and Embodiment, Carrie Noland examines the ways in which culture is both embodied and challenged through the corporeal performance of gestures. Arguing against the constructivist metaphor of bodily inscription dominant since Foucault, Noland maintains that kinesthetic experience, produced by acts of embodied gesturing, places pressure on the conditioning a body receives, encouraging variations in cultural practice that cannot otherwise be explained. Drawing on work in disciplines as diverse as dance and movement theory, phenomenology, cognitive science, and literary criticism, Noland argues that kinesthesia—feeling the body move—encourages experiment, modification, and, at times, rejection of the routine. Noland privileges corporeal performance and the sensory experience it affords in order to find a way beyond constructivist theory’s inability to produce a convincing account of agency. She observes that despite the impact of social conditioning, human beings continue to invent surprising new ways of altering the inscribed behaviors they are called on to perform. Through lucid close readings of Marcel Mauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Bill Viola, André Leroi-Gourhan, Henri Michaux, Judith Butler, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Derrida, and contemporary digital artist Camille Utterback, Noland illustrates her provocative thesis, addressing issues of concern to scholars in critical theory, performance studies, anthropology, and visual studies.
The Contours of Police Integrity
Author: Carl B. Klockars
Publisher: SAGE
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 321
ISBN-13: 0761925864
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPresenting a comprehensive overview of the potential for police misconduct worldwide, leading criminal justice scholars have compiled survey and case data from 10 countries chronicling police integrity and misconduct.
Aspiration
Author: Agnes Callard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-03-01
Total Pages: 256
ISBN-13: 0190639504
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBecoming someone is a learning process; and what we learn is the new values around which, if we succeed, our lives will come to turn. Agents transform themselves in the process of, for example, becoming parents, embarking on careers, or acquiring a passion for music or politics. How can such activity be rational, if the reason for engaging in the relevant pursuit is only available to the person one will become? How is it psychologically possible to feel the attraction of a form of concern that is not yet one's own? How can the work done to arrive at the finish line be ascribed to one who doesn't (really) know what one is doing, or why one is doing it? In Aspiration, Agnes Callard asserts that these questions belong to the theory of aspiration. Aspirants are motivated by proleptic reasons, acknowledged defective versions of the reasons they expect to eventually grasp. The psychology of such a transformation is marked by intrinsic conflict between their old point of view on value and the one they are trying to acquire. They cannot adjudicate this conflict by deliberating or choosing or deciding-rather, they resolve it by working to see the world in a new way. This work has a teleological structure: by modeling oneself on the person he or she is trying to be, the aspirant brings that person into being. Because it is open to us to engage in an activity of self-creation, we are responsible for having become the kinds of people we are.
Structure and Agency in Young People’s Lives
Author: Magda Nico
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-05-12
Total Pages: 234
ISBN-13: 1000367746
DOWNLOAD EBOOKStructure and Agency in Young People’s Lives brings together different takes on the possible combinations of agency and structure in the life course, thus rejecting the notion that young individuals are the single masters of their lives, but also the view that their social destinies are completely out of their hands. ‘How did I get here?’ This is a question young people have always asked themselves and is often asked by youth researchers. There is no easy and single answer. The lives that are told, on one hand, and their interpretation, on the other, may have the underlying idea of 'own doing' or the idea of 'social determinism' or, more accurately and frequently, a combination of the two. This collection constitutes a comprehensive map on how to make sense of youth’s biographies and trajectories, it questions and reshapes the discussion on the role and responsibility of youth studies in the understanding of how people juggle opportunities and constraints, and contributes to escaping what Furlong and Cartmel identified as the "epistemological fallacy of late modernity", in which young people find themselves responsible for collective failures or inevitabilities. It can thus interest students, researchers and professors, youth workers and all of those who work for and with young people.
Stricken by Sin, Cured by Christ
Author: Jesse Couenhoven
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2013-06-07
Total Pages: 275
ISBN-13: 0199948704
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAccording to Augustine's doctrine of original sin, Adam's progeny share a collective guilt which, like an infection, spreads through wayward sexual desires, passing from parent to child. But is it fair to blame sinners if they inherit evil like a disease? In Stricken by Sin, Cured by Christ Jesse Couenhoven clarifies the logic and illogic of Augustine's controversial views about human agency. The first half of the book examines why Augustine believed we are trapped by evil, and why only Christ can save us. Couenhoven examines overlooked texts Augustine wrote at the culmination of his career and offers a novel reading of his views about whether we control our personal identities, what we should be held culpable for, and whether freedom is compatible with necessity. The second half of the book develops a philosophically and scientifically astute theory of responsibility that makes it possible to retrieve some of Augustine's most divisive claims. Couenhoven makes a case for the surprising thesis that a carefully formulated doctrine of original sin is profoundly humane. The claim that sin is original takes seriously our dependence on one another for essential aspects of character and personality, our ownership of cognitive and volitional states that are not simply products of voluntary choices, and our status as personal agents of evil. Attending to these aspects of our lives challenges the idea that each individual's moral and spiritual standing is up to her or him, and drives us to ponder not only the nature of our responsibility and the shape of the freedom we seek, but also the need for grace we all share.
